It’s been awhile since I’ve sat down and done a guide, and truth be told, I almost didn’t do this one. Partly because this was our fifth Warmaster kill and I wasn’t sure if people would find it helpful or if it would be outdated already (I missed Frapsing our first two kills, and our second two kills were a mess!). However, Kurn nudged me a bit, and so I decided to go ahead and sit down to get this done. In listening to the replay of the encounter, there isn’t really a ton of druid-centric advice, but I think that’s because the encounter is fairly straight forward from a healing perspective. That being said, if you have a question please don’t hesitate to ask! I will list a few additional tips below!

As always, this video is viewed best at one of it’s larger resolutions.

Tips and Tricks!

You mentioned that you have the raid take Onslaught 2 and 4, but what about the rest of them? For Onslaught 1,3,5 we utilized fire mages and shadow priests. As long as you have a minimum of 3 people in the the onslaught and don’t let too many barrages hit, your boat should be OK. Fire mages can take every onslaught with cauterize, however your shadow priests can only do 1/5 or 3 as dispersion, even glyphed, will not be up for 1/3 or 3/5.

Can you go over those barrage groupings again? Sure thing! We use 4 groups, 1 for each quadrant of the boat. Each group will have 3-4 people in it, and will be comprised of ranged DPS and healers – with the healers split up between the groups. Each group is given a “group leader” and the group follows that person to know what barrage to soak. It is exceedingly important for the raid to keep their group alive by moving as a unit. Too many deaths early on will be a wipe. During onslaughts 1, 3 and 5 those groups that have mages and shadow priests will refrain from soaking to prevent deaths – and if you are grouped with a shadow priests or mage don’t let their tricky mirror images and apparitions fool you!

ToL and Tranquility. We used two druids for this encounter, so we split our tranqs to maximize them. She tranqed on the second onslaught, I tranqed on the fourth. I utilized my ToL for the second onslaught to split the cooldowns. This allowed me to have both cooldowns available again for phase 2 when there is a fair amount of raid damage. If you are the only druid on your raid team, feel free to swap the order of when you ToL and Tranq to better fit within the other cooldowns being used, just be sure that you utilize both abilities early enough in the encounter to have them back up during phase 2.

Any Special Times for Nature’s Grace? You can try to time is so that you have it up going into onslaughts, but there is usually enough damage going out during the fight that a nature’s grace proc isn’t wasted. During the second phase, try to time it as you are hotting up the raid for a shout to maximize your rejuvs and WGs!

Do You Do Anything Special in Phase 2? I do not! Just run through your basic raid healing routine to keep the raid up. Make smart use of nature’s grace, don’t forget to utilize your trinkets, WG as needed for damage and SM as needed for damage. If you find yourself going OOM in the second half of the encounter, try using a little less rejuv – but lean on rejuv as much as your mana will allow and pre-hot in preparation for for shouts as you are able.

How Do You Decide Who to Swiftmend in Phase 1? Since we ask the teams to stick to their team leader, I’ll often times try to SM that person. However, I’ll also use it on the tanks or melee as well. Since everyone is supposed to stay relatively grouped up, it shouldn’t matter who you SM, as it should hit the maximum number of people in that group.

Why Does My Raid Suck At Barrages and What Can I Do to Fix it? If only I had a good answer to that question! The truth is that phase one is really the meat of this encounter. Once your raid learns to prioritize the barrages and sticking together, it gets easier. Outside of making sure that there is enough damage on the adds, there is nothing that is more important than working as a team to soak those barrages. I recommend zooming our camera out as far as you can, and looking down on the screen, so that you can see the entirety of your quadrant without ever having to move the camera. This is really one of those fights where everything just “clicks”. In fact, that’s how I missed FRAPSing our first kill. I was like “eh, half the raid ate solo barrages, we’ve still got some work” – and the next pull somehow he was dead!

When do you Bloodlust? One of the most important things in this encounter is to make sure that you have one set of adds down before the next set arrives. When we were learning this fight, in order to facilitate that, we would use personal CDs for the first set of adds, Bloodlust the second set of adds, and use Potions on the third set. However,when the 10% nerf came we had a devil of a time in phase 2 because our boat was covered in fire all of the sudden. The reason ended up being because we were now killing our adds too fast and it changed the timing of the encounter for us such that we were getting fresh fire at the end of the add phase instead of during the third wave of adds. To remedy this we stopped bloodlusting the second wave of adds so that we’d take longer to kill them, and now bloodlust when Goriona lands. However, if you are struggling with killing the adds timely, do not hesitate to lust one of your add waves – if you can get through the adds, you can kill Blackhorn so don’t worry about not having lust up for him!

As always, please don’t hesitate to let me know if you have any questions! Good Luck and Have Fun!

One response to “Healing Heroic Warmaster Blackhorn (video guide)”

Nice guide as always Beru I just wanted to add my own suggestion to deal with this problem

“Why Does My Raid Suck At Barrages and What Can I Do to Fix it?”

Ignore them! We found that as long as we killed the drakes fast enough and dealt with the rest of the boat damage we could afford to completely ignore the barrages. This removes a layer of complexity from the fight which we found allowed people to push more dps and made everything much easier.

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If you intend to use anything on this website, please have the courtesy to attribute what you share, and offer links back to this site. If you are unsure if you can use the content found here, please do not hesitate to contact me directly. ~Beru